Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sunday March 02, 2008 @06:31AM
from the eye-on-the-sky dept.

Ted.com has a great sneak peek at Microsoft's new WorldWide Telescope project. In this video, presented by Roy Gould and Curtis Wong, you are able to see a combined view of satellites and telescopes from all over the planet and nearby space. The compiled image is rendered using Microsoft's new high-performance "Visual Experience Engine" that allows users to pan and zoom across the night sky seamlessly.

From Wikipedia's entry on Google Sky (which sites two articles on the matter): Google Sky is believed to be less expansive than its competitor WorldWide Telescope from Microsoft, which is regarded as significantly better.

Q. What is WorldWide Telescope?A. The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space telescopes to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft®'s high-performance Visual Experience Engine(TM), enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.

Couldn't find the same about Google Earth (Sky):

Explore the sky with Google Earth

Whether you're an astronomer or stargazer, Sky in Google Earth brings millions of stars and galaxies to your fingertips.

I believe it's using the Photosynth engine [ted.com]. I think the beauty of photosynth is that it is a self organising system for seamlessly navigating between photographs that gives you the illusion of animation. Microsoft's system can crawl web pages for material to add to the collage. So it does seem to be better" [channelregister.co.uk] than google sky as this system will be allowed continue to collect images published in astronomical papers and add these pages to the world wide telescope system.

Yes, it is, but it isn't new. It's nice that Microsoft has a cleaner and better implementation of it now and that better hardware makes it look smooth, but it's been around for nearly as long as images and networks.

That's the wrong question to ask, since the patents aren't just on the "world wide telescope", they are on much more basic technologies. Why don't you actually read them?Google Earth does what the world wide telescope is doing. It also does on-demand multi-resolution downloads of image data (as did Google Maps even), which is what some of the patents are actually claiming.

Oh, and of course, you're also anonymous. But based on your posting history, it seems likely that you work for Microsoft.

Hahaha, accusing me of working at Microsoft while I do not even live in America. But anyway Google Earth and Worldwide Telescope did not work the same way. Terraserver, created by Jim Gray (that missing sailor who works with Microsoft) was created even before Google exists. Can you show me where Google is in 1997? Did not exist yet IIRC. Good luck finding prior arts in this one buddy.

So it does seem to be better" than google sky as this system will be allowed continue to collect images published in astronomical papers and add these pages to the world wide telescope system.

Well, Google Sky loads stuff off various servers all the time as you pan and zoom into the map, just like Google Earth and, probably, MS Virtual Earth or Nasa WorldWind do. So, with the buzzwords stripped, I can't find anything substantial in your post about what's so different, let alone "world changing", in WWT.

This MS product does indeed sound very similar to Google Sky.I think the difference between both of these and e.g. Stellarium/Celestia is the database that sits behind them. Usually "planetarium" software consists of a bunch of points for stars, with perhaps a few objects represented by pixels. You can upload images but you have to do it yourself.

In contrast, Google Sky (and presumably the MS telescope) show you pixels from large databases such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The latter covers roughly 1/4

Microsoft will give this technology away, which requires their software which you have to purchase additional Windows server software for. Google will give their technology away and as a way to build their brand and reputation and your trust in them so they can more effectively deliver ads to your eyeballs.

Actually I don't believe it's using silverlight, which is a pity for linux dudes out there because whilst there is Linux support for Silverlight, I don't think there's linux support for Photosynth. Guess, you'll just have to be content with Google Sky;)

I think the thing that really ticks off the tech community about Microsoft, is that they don't really invent anything, they're just extrordinarily good and spotting excellent software early on, acquiring it and then marketing it better than any other company out there.

The guy who founded the company has been filing a dozen patents on obvious ways of doing image zooming and multiple level of detail rendering. Buying the company, Microsoft got the software, the patents, and they also established that the patents are valuable.

I don't see MS using patents as a weapon, only for FUD and defense. I know that's kind of like saying the dragon only uses his teeth when close, but it's still true.Personally, I'm not that worried about patents. Being sued usually presupposes a certain level of affluence and comes with the territory. As a citizen of the USA, I'm am worried. The patent for 'Scanning a check and exchanging information about the scanned check' is going to cost everyone money and make a few people rich. It about makes me

Yeah, "defense" as in "if you don't do what we want, we'll sue so long and hard, your investors will run screaming and your startup will crumble". Here, "do" can be anything from "give us a cross-license agreement on your patents" to "sell your company to us".

And because of cross-licensing agreements, Microsoft doesn't have to worry about any big competitor getting into a big fight with them.

Can you find me one historical example of Microsoft doing exactly that? Microsoft has historically used their patent portfolio LITERALLY as a defensive mechanism. When aggressive patent filers/enforcers come out swinging, THEN Microsoft brings out the portfolio, in much more of a "do you really want to pick the fight you think you want to pick"? Microsoft has not employed SCO-like tactics that I can recall. Perhaps I don't remember specific incidents that you are thinking of.

Google also acquired many of their recent products, including Google Earth. If these big companies want to buy all of this stuff and release it to the public for free, however, I'm not going to complain:)

Technically, no company invents anything. It is always people that invent things. Often those people are paid by companies to invent things. Does it really make a difference if they pay the person before the thing was invented or afterwards?

Acquisition is a legitimate tool to expand your business, this will sound like I'm avoiding naming names but there are some organisations that really help the open source movement that include several acquired companies... err I think Sun was one.

Curtis Wong explains what you can do, 5.15 into the video. Before that it is a load of boring talk about how it will allow us all to explore the universe and increase our understanding, etc but with some cool pictures of what you can expect to see from the world wide telescope. It will be a free download this spring from http://worldwidetelescope.org/ [worldwidetelescope.org]

I for one, am looking forward to this. I'm sure someone will ask if it can run on Linux. I've no idea, but I can't see it being that hard for Wine to get it working.

I'm the "Microsoft Visual Experience Engine" has some core dependency like DirectX 10, or whatever, that is a big pain in the ass to port. (Not to mention, corporate strategies behind Vista and all that).

In related news Microsoft has issued a press release indicating that users looking up are taking revenue from Microsoft, who now owns the copyright to 100% of the sky. "As we all know DRM is a critical issue today. If people could just look up any time they pleased there would be no need for our new software. Innovation would be stiffled and we have scientists who say the sky might fall." said Microsoft product manager I M ATwat. "For many years we at Microsoft have endured casual astronomers looking up at

Can't copyright the sky; it's public domain to begin with. Can't patent it, as there are numerous examples of prior art. Unless MS is planning on getting into the aerospace industry (always a possibility; watch for falling flaming debris) why would they actually do this? So their programmers can actually see what it looks like outside?

Also, I want to report a bug with the sky software. Sometimes this giant ball of fire becomes visible, and looking at it hurts my eyes.

Maybe they've got sanity projects for their programmers: let them do cool stuff, too, every once in a while. Maybe they just figure it's worth making investments on neat tech without quite knowing for sure what it will end up being used for. If anyone's got enough resources to do that, it's MS.

MS has been doing this kind of high concept demo's for years to provide real life examples of tech they hope to apply elsewhere - many people forget the first big mapping/aerial/satellite photography database on the web wasn't Google Maps, or Yahoo Maps, or any of the other big names today... It was Microsoft's Terraserver. (Which is still quite useful because one of it's layers is topo maps.)

The guy in the video behaves like he, i'm sorry, Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft, invented the Philosopher's Stone. The only difference between them and a free project like Celestia is, the "scientists" from MS have the money to buy the newest space images. But "new" is something else.

..kindly RTFA: it consists of actual imagery, not a model of the imagery like Celestia... (karma whoring: off)

Yes, but why is this being presented as as advantage over 3D modeling?

To answer my own question: A program like Celestia allows you to see hundreds of thousands of stars (or however many are in the database you are using). It allows you to "fly" to those stars, turn around and look back at our star from them, or see star configurations that are familiar to us on earth from other perspectives. Wha

The technology looks very cool, but Microsoft just can't resist spinning even where there doesn't seem to be any need at all. Check out the FAQ at worldwidetelescope: http://worldwidetelescope.org/buzz/FAQ.aspx [worldwidetelescope.org]

Q. When did Microsoft first starting looking at the sky?A. For 16 years, Microsoft has invested, and will continue to invest, in long-term, broad-based research through Microsoft Research. WorldWide Telescope is built on work that started with Jim Gray's SkyServer and his contributions to Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Sky Server (a portal to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) was first released in 2001. Aside from the poor grammar in the question, reading that answer just made my skin crawl...

I've been very lucky to see this project from alpha to present because one of friends interned with the group and introduced me to them - its gone through some amazing development - I remember seeing this I think early 2007 - it looked more like Stellarium than anything else but just plane black with solid circles for stars and galaxies. It took forever to load images when you zoomed in. Must have crashed about 30 times in a five minute demo.

Jonathan Fay (of MaximDL fame) showed it off at Table Mountain Star Party last year and they'd moved from that sky to a synthetic pre-rendered sky that would transition to real images from Hubble or other sources as you zoomed in.

Saw it again at the American Astronomical Society Meeting this January in Austin and really got to play with it since they were right alongside the Harvard IIC booth. It was the first time they were using real imagery for the entire sky and it looked amazing and Jonathan was touting the tour facility.

Its biggest trick in my mind though you didn't see in the video - one little slider that takes you from the Optical to the Infrared and Microwave and X-Ray sky. Simply blew me away.

It already supports VOTable and FITS images and dozens of other formats that astronomers use and are becoming standards for enthusiastic hobbyists. You can take your own images and put them up on the same sky as data from Chandra or Swift or the best ground based data from MMT or Magellan or Keck. Now it starts to get really useful. The CfA at Harvard has been digitizing its old plates of sky images, Pan-STARRS will start operating sooner rather than later, SDSS has a ton of data already and LSST will be up in a few years imaging the entire sky every few nights. This is a monstrous amount of data and the system really gives you a way to search through it all very intuitively. I'd love the ability to click on a star in the sky and have all known spectra of it pop up along with references. Not quite there yet but it will be.

This also makes it the best educational tool. There are projects like Las Cumbres and several schools and colleges have access to telescopes so this gives you a great tool with which to look at data and take your own data and do it in a way that doesn't require you learning how to use NED and SIMBAD and looking for papers on ADS. But I think the biggest thing it does is just blow you away with a sense of how large everything is, or perhaps how small you are in relation and I think that is a very powerful idea. I remember the first time I saw the Eames Power of Ten video - this takes that to a different level and is genuinely thought provoking.

>>Galileo's invention was universe-shatteringNot exactly his invention, suggest you do a little history review. Refining it and how it was used and the observatons discovered by his 'telescopes' are what is important.

Galileo was brilliant, scary brilliant, but even he 'embraced' and 'extended' technology. I suppose this now makes him a fraud and evil in your eyes?

PS I don't dispute Galileo's contributions; however, I would make a really good side bet that MORE people in the world know 'Microsoft' tha

I'm not sure if that was just a lame demo, but that "telescope" is really not a big deal.

It's basically one of the application I already had installed in my Linux box for years, but only with a bigger database. That can surely not be accounted as an invention, and certainly not as big an invention as the telescope 400 years ago.

You have had an application on your linux box that has access to very up-to-date images of the sky? That allows you to move around seamlessly from one celestial body to the next, shifting the spectrum of the images to view planets/stars as you go? To save a tour and publish it for others to see? Don't get me wrong, there are some decent astronomy packages on Linux, but this is something new entirely.

If Google Maps was a "me too" project, then it was for MapQuest or Yahoo Maps. I was a big user of Terraserver back in the day, but Google Maps initially launched with just street maps, it didn't have any satellite views. Also, Google was the first to put a really useable interface on internet street maps.

After those huge storms up north that sent that massive swell all down the coast of California; I find it unlikely he is alive.Still don't give up though and good luck as I have seen his sail boat docked in Catalina harbor before while cruising to shore.

Sailing must be much more dangerous up north with all the massive ships and quick storms that kick up.

Are you suggesting burning the land and boiling the sea are also in MSFTs plans?

more like already attempted and partially implemented by purchasing competitors only to terminate their product lines along with promoting patent FUD via SCO and then their own IP threats/FUD. So yes, they have been working on burning the land and boiling the seas for quite some time.

More like Microsoft DRM Information wants to be free FUD You cannot steal an idea, only infringe on it SCO Intellectual Property is evil P2P They stole Apple's idea and manipulated them into giving them copyrights OOXML Convicted Monopolist! So yes, [bad thing], for quite some time.

I hate to be so reactive to the things I have recently seen, but I wonder what would happen if you exposed this system to the autistic community? It seems like a lot of data that would do well to be digested by someone predisposed to taking it all in at once.

Yep, it's maximum distance we can see without light getting too caught up in the early, dense universe. I guess the observable universe would be slightly smaller back then also, but probably not noticeably. It's kinda strange because it's always been "observable" as in it is potentially feasible to see this light, but we weren't "able-to-observe" until more recently...or at least distinguish it.

D00d, I luv the way you say "Linuzz" instead on "Linux", and "Abble" instead of "Apple" (even if I don't really get "Abble") but you missed the obvious and oh-so-original "Open Sores" line that cracks me up everytime.

Back on topic, Google [google.com] have already done this, Celestia [shatters.net] have already done this (and Celestia is free software - sorry, "open sores"), so what's *not* to bash about Microsoft (damn, that should be M$) arriving late to the party? What does Microsoft bring to the party that we don't already have - in spades - already? Fanbois?

I know, I shouldn't feed the troll, but it was so cute, sitting there under the bridge...